Wednesday, November 27, 2013

With only three tickets left and hundreds of films to choose
from, I was in a quandary.What to see? Well, there was a panel discussion called “Class of 2013: New Canadians Directors to Watch,
around noonish, which the home office hadsent me an invte for andthey kind of wanted me to go, so I had to work around that.

So looking at the schedule, I had to find something that
wouldn’t conflict, and after discovering that 12/12/12 hade been postponed for
my convenience, I found a harmless enough romantic comedy called The Right Kind of Wrong, directed by Jeremiah
S. Chechik, and starring Ryan Kwantenas Leo Palamino, who’s backstory is ripped off from Woody Allen’sManhattan.
Leo, a failed writer turned dishwasher falls in love with Colette (Sara
Canningon) the day of her wedding - to another man, the seemingly perfect but
demonstrably evil Danny Hart (Ryan McPartlin).

Y’all out there in Internet land know how this thing ends.
This sort of thing has been done before dozens of times. However there is some snappy
dialogue and the scenery (Jasper National Park in the Canadian Rockies) is
totally spectacular.It’s almost
worth the price of a ticket to see that alone.

So with that bit of fluff over, I headed to the Filmmakers’
Lounge at the Hyatt Regency Hotel for that panel discussion. ..

Throwing temper tantrums usually end in one of two ways,
victory or jail. I had the invite on my hard drive. I showed it to them as well
as my credentials, but since my creds were of the third rate variety, they
wouldn’t let me in. I argued, I cajoled, I tried to callthe people inside (damn you Virgin
Mobile!)and it looked like it was
getting hairy (and late, it had started) whendivine providence intervened.. One of the people who were
hosting the thing was just walking by and heard me raising my voice at the
security guard.

They weren’t very happy, but I was.

I was then treated to the final fifteen minutes of how to
get a grant from the Canadian Film Board. That’s socialism for you. Down here
we get to go to banks and have to pay all the money back.One of the directors was one of the
most beautiful women I’ve seen all year, and the rest looked like me. Oh well…

When that was over, I found out where the free soda was
before heading back to the multiplex to see the next film. A Buffy parody called All Cheerleaders Die, which wasn’t
nearly as bad as it sounds. Okay, it WAS, but nearly not exactly, which is what
makes the Midnight Madness section
of the festival the best part.

Now comes the logistics part. The home office had sent me an
invite to a regular screening of a documentary called Mission: Congo, which was one of the most important films of the
entire festival, but more on that later.First I had to sneak in.

Now you may be wondering why I had to sneak in if I already
had an invitation…well, this was a regular
screening, which meant that without the right creds, I couldn’t just hang
around the area and tell them I was on the list. So I had to sneak around and
find who and where the publicists were and get a hard ticket. This was harder
than it sounded. First off, they weren’t there just yet, and when they got
there, they didn’t have my ticket.They called their people back at the office and yes, I was on the list
and someone somewhere hat the ticket.UG. Happy ending: just as the lights were going out, they found the damn
thing and I got in.

Lara Zizic and David Turner's engrossing documentary
lays a well-deserved sucker punch on Televangelist Pat Robertson. It seems this thieving shit conned millions of
people into financing his Congo diamond mines by disguising it as aide for the
victims of the Rwanda genocide back in 1994.

The film reports that Robertson’s “Operation Blessing” is
still soliciting donations to operate Congo hospitals and schools never
actually built, Disgusting.

Robertson threatened a lawsuit. I don’t know whether or not
he will….

So there was one more ticket left. I wanted to see Gravity, but it started too late. So ,
instead I took in Peter Landesman’sParkland, which played out as an
episode ofLaw and Order: JFK. The acting was fine. There was
nothing wrong with the film per se, but this story has been done over and over
and over again so much, that it feels like it’s sleepwalking. True, it’s about
the ordinary people who somehow got caught up it the whole thing , like
Oswald’s brother(James Badge Dale) or the doctors at the Parkland hospital
emergency room. The Kennedys, LBJ and Oswald seem to be totally out of place in
their own story.I expect it’ll
come and go without much of a trace.

With that over, and the Festival barely started, I went back
to my hotel, got my stuff, and left Canada.Maybe next year, I’ll get to do it right.

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Its that time of year again in the great white north. All
the stars fly up from Los Angeles and New York to that other city by the lake
to see what Hollywood has to offer this fall.I am, of course talking about the Toronto Film Festival, the
preeminent cinematic event that Canada has to offer.

I haven’t been for a number of years, and I’ve discovered
that the whole thing has moved south.When I first came up there, back at the end of the 90s, the whole ting
was primarily in a small area around Bloor Street, where the green line subway
meets the yellow line. There were a bunch of theaters and restaurants in the
area, all within easy walking distance and there was an underground area where
you could walk around when it was raining. The Bes part was that I got to go to
all the films and panels and stuff on a full pass. I really appreciated that.

Now things are different. The foundation that runs the fest
has it’s own building, the uptown Varity multiplex has been replaced with the
downtown Scotiabank Cineplex, and they let me have a measly five “rush tickets”
That mean I have to wait out in the rain (okay, that only happened once) for at
least 40 minutes for a P&I screening while al the“real” critics” got to wait inside. To make matters worse, I
wouldn’t be able to use any of the facilities, except maybe a toilet.

I knew this already, so I only went for two days instead of
the usual ten.You can’t really
see or do all that much in that amount of time, but it would be better than
nothing. The reason for this state of affairs was that I was asked bout last
years request a couple of weeks after this year’s deadline, I wasn’t planning
on going this year, and what it was all about. I told the editor in chief here
what the thing was and why I didn’t go, and he said why didn’t I go? To make a
long story short, we sent a request, and they sat on it for a couple of weeks
and offered me my “consolation prize” less than two weeks before festival
started.

This meant that the airline prices went up in less than 36
hours and I had to make up my mind ASAP. Still, all the cheap tickets were
gone, so I had to do an open jawed deal going to Buffalo, crossing over Niagara
Falls, and taking a bus to Toronto.

After spending the night at a youth hostel on the American
side and spending a few hours on the Megabus, I got to my destination. I
checked in and went to the registration office in order to pick up my
tickets.That’s when the fun
started.

This sort of stuff always happens. I go, wait on line, and
when I try to pick up the tickets, they aren’t there. Well, THEY were, but my
name wasn’t. We had words. They got the supervisor. HE had heard of me, but my
name still wasn’t on the list, so he went to his supervisor. Time passed ..And
passed. . I got my tickets.This
sort of shit is supposed to happen at Sundance not here!

Next was to check out the press lounge. The two nice ladies
at the front wouldn’t let me in. I asked for the list of all the publicists.
They wouldn’t give it to me.

I know they wouldn’t have given me anything had I not been
sending them coverage for a full ten years for now extinct publications.But still…jeez!

Having gotten dinner at one of the many high-end restaurants
across from the festival headquarters. I went to Sociabank Cineplex and saw
Kick Ass 2, which was as bad as everyone said it was. But it was good practice
anyway.

Next day, I got up bright and early to see my first film.
The Fifth Estate was supposed to be one of he highlights of the festival. There
was an eight thirty AM screening and things being the way they were, I had to
get on line soon. …

But they had decided to cancel that screening at the last
minute.Oh JOY! So I had to find a
schedules so I could figure out what the hell I was going to do for the rest of
they day.That was actually
somewhat easy. The next film worth seeing was Don Jon, a romantic comedy for men, written, directed and starring
Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

G-L plays the title character, who’s into porn, cleaning and
religion, in that order. He meets a nice Jewish girl named Barbara (Scarlett
Johansson), who proceeds to take over his life. This leads to problems, which
are somehow solved by Esther(Julianne Moore), whom he meets in a class Barbara
forces him to take.. its funny and incisive and will make a ton of money.

So with that over, we look at the schedule and
discover….*groan*..three films all at the same damn time. Now this has been a
problem with the P&I screenings since I first started going way back in the
‘90s. So we I guess it’s best to go to a Harry Potter movie. This time Daniel
Radcliff plays Allen Ginsburg, who is a freshman in college and has yet to
become the first hippie. Here he meets Lucien Carr(Dane DeHaan), who introduces
him toJack Kerouac(Jack Huston)
and William S. Burroughs(Ben Foster) at a salon of sorts run by David Kammerer(Michael
C. Hall), who has been stalking Lou and ends up dead.

This is not a murder mystery, but it is actually rather
good, especially Foster. The film’s title is : Kill Your Darlings. I has to do with editing advice.

When this was all over, there was the David Cronenberg reception,
which was a mile to the west of where the main action was. It was the opening
of an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. Wine, cheese and
lousy art, even if it was done by Cronenburg., and some of it wasn’t.

Little kids love dinosaurs. Ages ago, as a little kid
myself, I was like everyone else in that regard.I had a Styrofoam T-rex skeleton in my room, some toys and a
whole bunch of books on the subject.

One of these was a guide to ancient life published by Little
Golden books. Like some of my others, it went back to the beginning of the
planet, which meant that it had a little bit on the first four billion years of
earth’s history and really started in the Cambrian, where the first fossils
came from. I really liked this part. The animals from the Paleozoic were so
exotic and weird, especially the invertebrates, which were usually ignored
after the Devonian’s fish and amphibians, took the stage and stuff started to
look like dinosaurs

But I was fascinated by the invertebrates. I was a trilobite
freak. They dominated the seas until the middle of the Paleozoic, and then they
petered out, going extinct at the end of the era. But there were others, giant
sea scorpions, and echinoderms: starfish, sea urchins, and beautiful and weird
stalked things called sea lilies or crinoids.Ah crinoids! a minor childhood obsession that stuck in the
back of my mind for a lifetime. Crinoids still exist at the bottom of the seas
and I dearly wanted to see one in real life.

Sea Lilies dominated the seas of the Paleozoic, they are
some of the most common fossils and in the shallow seas of the time and, there
were billions of them, covering the ocean floor like sunflowers in Kansas. One
tiny group of them managed to survive into the Mesozoic and they flourished
again, but after the dinosaurs died out, they retreated into the deep abyss,
well out of range for snorkelers like yours truly.

Then, decades after I gave up hope, an opportunity presented
itself.

Roatán is the largest of Honduras’ Bay Islands. G Adventures
had a month long tour of Central America that was 20% off, and it being cold up
here in New York in December, I had decided to take it.Roatain was one of the stops and it was
primarily for the beach.One thing
I discovered when I got there was that there was this guy named Karl Stanley, who
had a submarine and gave tours of the continental shelf all the way down to the
bottom of the Caribbean Sea.The
eight year old in the back of my mind screamed out: “There’s CRINOIDS down
there and I wanna see ‘em!!!”So
the middle-aged rest of me decided investigate whether or not it was
practicable or not.

There are lots of dive shops in Half Moon Bay, and they all
knew about Stanley’s Roatán Institute for Deep-sea Exploration, but
unfortunately none of them could get me a reservation. He makes them himself
via his website or in person. It’s either PayPal or cash, and at $600 p.p. is
out of most people’s league and I didn’t know it was per person at double
occupancy.Still, it was worth a
try…

I went to Half Moon Bay’s lone Internet café and sent an
email. Then I went to actually find the office. This was a bit harder than I
expected, as it was on the second floor of a slightly rundown house surrounded
by near identical rundown houses.I found him and introduced myself. He then explained that due to weight
distribution on his submarine, it was two passengers or nothing, but there was
this woman who wanted a ride. He’d contact here and if she was a go, I was a
go. That’s six hundred bucks, IN CASH. Something like Sixteen THOUSAND Honduran
Lampiras.

So I went on an expedition to find an ATM that had that much
money in it.This required a boat
trip to the next town and sneaking into a ritzy resort with guards.

I went back to Half Moon Bay with a huge bulge in my money
belt and prayed that I wouldn’t get robbed.

I stopped by the office again and asked Stanly if he wanted
my money. He said not yet, he hadn’t heard from the other person. So I went
back into town and waited…

So I had dinner and then went to a bar for a bit and went to
bed. The next morning, I got up, had some coffee and went to look at the
submarine. Stanley came down and told me he hadn’t heard from the other person.
I said he should call, in case the guy at the hotel had forgot to give her the
message.

It turned out he had: The start of a glorious day.

So we waited while my partner went to get six hundred bucks
in cash while we were waiting, Stanley and his crew prepped the boat while he
told me his story:

He was a big fan of nature shows as a kid, and in junior
high he decided to make a deep-sea submarine in his back yard.That’s sort of like building a Lear
Jet, it’s not rocket science, but…no, it IS rocket science. You have to find
the right materials, understand propulsion and pressure, and make most of the
parts yourself.

I guess he tried it out in a lake or something, he went to a
trade show and tried to sell it No buyers, which is understandable, who in his
right mind would buy the equivalent of a homemade spaceship from a frigging
teenager?

So Stanly went to college, getting a BA in American politics
or something. I was pretty amazed because I would have imagined he would have
majored in Oceanography. I think he took some courses however.

So he took his midlevel tech toy and went to Roatan. The
reason was twofold: The continental shelf was only a couple of hundred yards
from the beach, and Honduras didn’t have any regulations regarding submarines.
That was 1994.

Since then he’s built a better sub and has gone down
thousands of times. He complained that he undercharged National Geographic and
Animal planet when they went down with him to film abyssal sea life.He was telling me about the politics of
the island when my partner and her boyfriend showed up.

We shook hands; I gave Stanly my money and so did she. We
were weighed, signed a waiver (he doesn’t have insurance} and off we wen…no we
didn’t. She went into the sub and got a massive claustrophobia attack.She got out and demanded her money
back.White as a sheet she was. My
dream of crinoids was dying right then and there. I still wanted to go, but
without another person, it was impossible.I waited while he got out his cell phone and called another
person who was interested. He still was and was thrilled he had just gotten
someone else to go with him.

I was stuck. Stanly was out twelve hundred bucks and all the
work for the morning’s preparations. I felt sick, but then... then he came up
with an idea. He was friends with a retired nurse who ran a clinic on the
island for the impoverished residents and had promised to give one of the
volunteers a free trip.He made
the call. Someone was picked. I would only have to pay the per person fee.

Inner space, here I come!

Continental shelves are something that is rather hard to
imagine for us landlubbers. Most people who go to the beach generally find that
the ground beneath the sea gradually gets deeper and deeper until one cannot
stand up anymore.One doesn’t expect
a two-mile high cliff.As we went
along the surface of the Caribbean, it was like the glass bottom boats that
were available for trips at far less money. Bits of coral surrounded by plants
and small fish.It was
surprisingly drab. Then we hit the cliff face, went out into the open sea, and
started going down.

With our backs to the cliff face, things started getting
dark,that was about two hundred feet. Then five. It was totally black and our
guide decided to turn on the lights, but that wasn’t much of a help until we
passed a thousand then at around 1200 feet we hit bottom.

There was a rock. Stanly told us to look for a beer can on
our left. The rock was further away than I had thought, and it was huge. There
was a chimera, a kind of shark swimming close by. We didn’t see it for
long.However we did see sponges,
though, lots and lots of sponges.

As we realized we were actually at the bottom of the sea,
Jeremy got us off the bottom, turned our sub around, and began the slow ascent
to the surface.

Over the last two million years, the polar ice caps have
retreated and advanced many times, and with each advance the depth of the ocean
has varied by hundreds of feet, and with no pollution to harm it for most of
that time, the coral grew and grew. Coral only thrives near the surface, so the
reefs down near the bottom are all fossils, but everything else is still quite
alive and mostly sponges and crustaceans. We didn’t see all that many
crustaceans, but we did see some fish swimming along the cliff face. They
didn’t look as weird as I had hoped, but it was kind of strange to see them
swimming vertically instead of horizontally.Then we saw one.

There are two kinds of crinoids: stalked sea lilies and
free-swimming, stalkless feather stars.Down where were we were, the stalked kind pretty much had the area all
to themselves. There one was in all it’s glory with its fronds hanging out,
catching detritus from further up.I’d been waiting decades to see this.For a second I was a kid again, dreaming of the Paleozoic,
which was what was sitting right in front of me. Jeremy pointed out a
nondescript shell, which, he said was worth ten thousand dollars. It was a Monoplacophoran,
which was known only from fossils and down around here. Prior to 1952, it was
thought they had been extinct for 250 million years.I’d heard of these and wished they were more interesting
looking.

The thing about Jeremy’s submarine was that it had a huge
front window. The view of the cliff face was really easy to look out of.Life became more common as we ascended,
and I got to see more sea lilies and Coral-like Sea Fans. There was a feather
star sitting on a sea fan, which would have made a nice photograph, and all
sorts of weird sponges and tunicates, which are vertebrates who think they’re
sponges.Then at about four
hundred feet we saw a lionfish.

Lionfish are an invasive species that got into the Caribbean
area when either hurricane Andrew or Katrina freed some from an aquarium
breeding company in Florida or Louisiana. They are currently everywhere between
the Carolinas and Venezuela and are THE ecological problem of the region, which
is saying something.

All too soon it was over. Had that women not gotten
claustrophobia, we would have had an extra hour, but I had seen what I came to
see.It would be enough.

Friday, January 18, 2013

The election is over thank God, but fascination with the
presidency goes on. The “big three”: Washington, Lincoln and Franklin
Roosevelt, are back with a vengeance on the big and little screens.

First:George
Washington. The latest edition of Assassin’s
Creed takes place during the American Revolution and GW is a major
character. Unfortunatly, I suck at video games so I haven’t actually perused it

Next: is Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. Filmmakers have been trying to portray the Great
Emancipator since at least Birth of a
Nation a century ago, and with the possible exception of Raymond Massy most
have failed. I guess the reason is that he’s too iconic. There’s something
about being a national hero, THE national hero that makes a portrayal as a
regular human.Spielberg doesn’t
do a full biography, but just concentrates on one incident, the passing of the
13th amendment to the Constitution, the first in over half a
century.

The film is for the most part a celebration of the art of
lobbying. Secretary of State Seward(David Strathairn), hires three unsavory lobbyists(James Spader et
al)to bribe Democrats (who were
the bad guys in those days) by offering retiringand defeated congressmen patronage jobs.

While Daniel
Day Lewis is utterly brilliant as Lincoln, Tommy Lee Jones steals the show
playing Thaddeus Stevens, the Pennsylvania Congressman who led the antislavery
movement well before there even was a Republican party. He channels Don Rickels
and is a hoot. This is one of his best performances ever, and the whole thing
is reminiscent of “The West Wing” in 19th century drag.

Finally, there’s Hyde
Park on the Hudson, which has been going ‘round the film festival circuit
and opens soon. If this doesn’t get Bill Murray an Oscar®, he’ll never get one.
The film’s got everything a Masterpiece Theater fan or political junkie would
want.After all, there’s nothing
the British are better at than a good costume drama, and the visit of King
George VI(Samuel West) and his queen(Olivia Colman) to the US in 1939 is the
perfect vehicle for expanding the American market.

With the Great Depression finally ending and World War II
looming on the horizon, someone in the administration had decided that
President Roosevelt(Murray) needed a playmate, and found one in his sixth
cousin Daisy Suckley(Laura Linney), who is taking care of a very aged
aunt.

The film has a feel of Downton
Abbey meets the West Wing to it,
as Daisy and FDR fall in like with each other and what happens when she
discovers he’s shagging his secretary Missy Lehand(Elizabeth Marvel), while
their majesties are making a royal visit to deliver Neville Chamberlin’s
request for help now that he realized he’d made a huge mistake trying to buy
Hitler off.

It’s a fun film. All in all it’s really nice to see history
done right for a change. I remember how Spielberg really botched Martin Van
Buren in Amistad, a decade ago, and
more recently, Oliver Stone’s horrible history series on Showtime,
but with the election over, and politics thankfully on the back burner for a
year and a half, I don’t think we will see anything like these films for quite
a while.

One good example is Anna
Karenina, based on Tolstoy’s classic soap opera. Anna is married to a
saintly (as she says so over and over again) national cabinet minister, with
whom she’s in love with. So, it’s obvious, Tolstoy, who was a bit of a
misogynist, will move to destroy this domestic bliss. So she falls in love with
a beautiful moron with the title of Baron, and…you get the idea.

Tolstoy is famously wordy. This appears to be based on the
Cliff Notes® version, and that is mostly a mean little story (or two, but they
appear to have little to do with each other), so how to make it watchable?
Staging?

The film takes place in a theater. Since this is a movie,
the entire theater, from the rafters to the seats, are used.At first, this is a good idea; the
camera angles and the stylized costuming distract us from the mostly boring
story. The contrast between the lush costumes and scenery and the spartan,
stylized space, and things like model trains going from St. Petersburg to
Moscow, but then sometime in the middle, one of the characters walks out into a
field, and the illusion falls apart. The illusion that we’re watching a play is
shattered, and it turns into a regular movie, and then we discover that the
only reason this is considered a classic is that it was written by Tolstoy, not
on it’s own merits.

The problem with a film like this is that people come for
the story and not the visuals. This isn’t always the case, Avatar was a huge hit and had one of the worst scripts of the
decade. But in this case, it’s literary film all about the writing, and if the
writing fails, then the whole ting falls apart.

The fact that it’s having a very limited release won’t be
any help either, as this sort of thing is going to be decided by word of mouth
of the literati. It’s going to be a massive flop.

Another literary adaptation that isn’t doing all that well
is Life of Pi, which is a much, much
better film.

They said Life of Pi
was unfilmable. Clearly it is. . The reason is CGI animation. Many of the
backgrounds and all the animals are computer generated, creating a
wonder-filled sea and a carnivorous island. The magically realist story is
brought completely to life by Ang Lee and his team of animators. The technology
is now fully capable, and the visuals add greatly to the storytelling.

The acting is professional. No one gives a poor, or even
mediocre performance and before the it turns into a literal cartoon, it more
than holds one’s attention, but then the ship sinks and the Pi() begins toplay second fiddle to the CGI
characters. It’s one guy in front of a green screen all by his little self.
Armed only with Tom Stoppard’s script and Ang Lee’s direction. The whole thing
works, so why isn’t it doing better? 007 and Vampires, as Parents were all at
the stores buying gifts, as their kids go off to the movies so they don’t act
as a drag on mom and dad.

This may be one of those years that the Oscars will go to
film s that few before their nominated, and Classic books and recent best
sellers will get the short shrift.

The world is coming to an end. Again. On December the 21st,
2012, long count of the Mayan calendar, which allegedly started back around
3200 BC, for reasons that no one actually knows. So lots of people think that
when the long count ends, the whole world will go blooy. I’m going down to
Copan in Honduras, which is the easternmost edge of the “Mundo Maya.” There’s
going to be parties everywhere, so why not?

The end of the world is something that is predicted and
re-predicted about two or three times a year. Sometimes, these predictions are
right on. The Jehovah’s Witnesses said it would happen in August of 1914, and
some Jewish mystic said it would on Rosh Hashanah 5700 (September 1939), and lo
and behold; there were two world wars. So who knows?

All the brouhaha has to do with the fact that the Maya are
famously mysterious. This is because they liked to throw away their cities
every now and then, and melt back into the forest. They lost all but two of
their books to Spanish censors back in the 1550s, and so their alphabet
(actually a syllabary like the Japanese) was long forgotten and illegible. That
was until the 1990s, but before then, they were considered a mysterious and
peaceful bunch of astronomers who had a perfect civilization before they
vanished entirely, and left their land to a bunch of savages who took the name,
and oh yeah, they had this really funky calendar which ends in 2012.

They still say that on some History Channel specials.

But in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, the “glyphs” were deciphered
and everything changed, the Maya were learned to be ruled by a warlike bunch
who liked to fight with each other until the commoners got fed up and left for
the jungles, leaving their glimmering cities to collapse.

It is these cities, which were never really lost, that have
become the center of the tourist industry of Western Central America, from
Chiapas to the west to Somewhere in El Salvador to the east. The most famous of
these is Chechen Izta near the north coast of the Yucatan peninsula, Iconic as
is possible to be, it’s located in a theme park of sorts, just the place for an
“end of the world “ celebration.

Most of the major public Mayan cities are gearing up for a
tourist bonanza, New Agers from everywhere are going to do their thing to celebrate
what they think are the ancient rites of the pre-decipherment mythology. With
any luck, there’s going to be lots of semi-legal intoxicants to enhance the
experience.

It’s kind of late to do anything about getting there, but in
case you can, most of the festivities are near the beach. Cancun, for example
is a genuine Mayan temple in theHotel Zone (it was the only thing there before the city was planned.),
The dozen theme parks along the “Riviera Maya” are all having big events, and
Belize is having a major push to double it’s usual tourism revenue.

The Mystery of the Maya is vanishing, Archeologist have
managed to discover most of the reasons why the so-called “Classic”
civilization collapsed(El Niño,
and a long drought) and even so, the ruins are impressive pretty much anywhere.
The best are Chechen Itza, which is easy go get to and Palenque, which is not,
Both in Mexico, Tikal and Copan, which are in Central America and are to some
extent even better, but are quite difficult to get to.There are lots of minor sites which can
be fascinating.

Remember if you want to find out more, stay away from
anything New Agey. The New Age movement has rejected most of the knowledge
acquired by archeologists in the past few decades and tries to cling to stuff
which was proffered by Eric Thompson, who was bamboozled by Mayan friends of
his who proffered a totally fraudulent picture of the civilization and tried to
enforce his view on the academic world for much of the 20th century.

Those who think the castles and pyramids were built under
the supervision of Space Aliens are still around and are going to be down in
the Riviera Maya in force. It’s going to be fun to watch them make fools of
themselves up close.

The REAL thing is always more interesting than the fantasy.
Hopefully theend of the world
will make this idea more popular.